Post navigation

Pig populations are nearing a million in the state of Florida, encroaching on urban areas and destroying an F-16 fighter plane in Jacksonville. Feral pigs are running (hog) wild in the streets of Berlin, with dedicated pig squads waging a losing battle to overtake them. They’ve become a fixture on the West Bank, after Israeli settlers, some say, released boars to destroy Palestinian croplands. There are even thousands of radioactive wild pigs wandering Europe, thanks to the tainted feeding grounds near Chernobyl.

A good read, with memorable phrases such as, “dolphins of the land,” “pig drones” and “pork chopper” (helicopters that hunt boar).

No clear solution in sight. Maybe the encroaching coyote and bear populations will even things out.

A prime number is a number greater than one that cannot be divided evenly by any numbers except one and itself.

What we see here is the numbers from 1 to 62,500 laid out in order, where the prime numbers are bright squares and non-primes (“composites”) are dim squares.

As you can see, the grid looks a lot like an office building at night: seemingly random which windows are lit and which are dark. Yet there are columns free of primes — our first sign of order in the constellation of numbers.

…

The nature of numbers and the occurrence of primes is a central problem in a field of mathematics called “number theory”. Very smart people have been working very hard for a very long time–but the secret of prime numbers remains elusive. There is no efficient equation to generate every prime, or even to always generate a prime.